Why awk script does not work on Mac OS but works on Linux?

Question

I have this awk script that I use to filter genes that are differentially expressed. I have a csv file that was created in R.

 #Command to get DE genes
awk -         


        

Answer 1

A same command name doesn't mean it is the same command. Most basic commands have a different implementation, AWK is an example, but almost all the GNU core utils has their equivalent in BSD license. You should be careful with GNU sed and BSD sed, it's a pitfall too.

In reality Linux generally uses gawk or mawk:

$ man awk
mawk - pattern scanning and text processing language

Mac OS uses generally nawk:

$ man awk
awk - pattern-directed scanning and processing language

See this page for more informations about AWK implementations.

Answer 2

I also had the same problem. Installing gawk on OSX 10.11.2 through brew solved my issue.

~$ brew install gawk
~$ gawk --version | head -n 1
GNU Awk 4.1.4, API: 1.1 (GNU MPFR 3.1.4-p1, GNU MP 6.1.1)
~$